A "engineering manager" should have at least one task, it shouldn't be blocking or critical. The manager should at least build the code, push it, and see the unit tests actually run. With enough experience you should be able to spot things, eg, "HEY! There are no unit tests for this part!".
Not doing this makes you the restaurant owner on Gordan Ramsey's Kitchen nightmares. These restaurant owners are always confused whey their food sucks, why food is rotten in the fridge and why everything is failing. If you want to know why you shouldn't leave the 'process of developing software' -- just watch one show of Kitchen nightmares. Also, if you 'are too high up to code' -- change your title to: "project manager".
As a point of fact, there are plenty of episodes of Kitchen Nightmares where the main reason for failure seems to be the owner meddling too much with the people who are actually doing the work.
> A "engineering manager" should have at least one task, it shouldn't be blocking or critical. The manager should at least build the code, push it, and see the unit tests actually run. With enough experience you should be able to spot things, eg, "HEY! There are no unit tests for this part!".
If you're saying we don't need managers anymore because that's what our CI/CD pipeline does, I agree!
I think a good manager has other responsibilities such as negotiating with other teams to enable their team's success. They don't need to understand the low-level details, but they should be able to comprehend complexity when explained, so even if I only produce '1' feature, they can be certain that my good job didn't produce '10' additional bugs to be discovered by the customers.
Did you even watch the show? In about half of the episodes Ramsay kicks the owner who can’t cook but thinks he can out of the kitchen and lets staff handle it
Not doing this makes you the restaurant owner on Gordan Ramsey's Kitchen nightmares. These restaurant owners are always confused whey their food sucks, why food is rotten in the fridge and why everything is failing. If you want to know why you shouldn't leave the 'process of developing software' -- just watch one show of Kitchen nightmares. Also, if you 'are too high up to code' -- change your title to: "project manager".